Health care organizations are faced with increasingly disparate data collection and reporting requirements from a wide variety of public and private organizations. The current array of unresolved data collection issues, including many variations in measures across the various quality reporting and performance measurement systems, results in:
duplications of effort
increased expense
lost opportunities
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services laid out their Stage 3 Requirements dealing with reporting:
Full calendar year reporting period beginning in 2017
CQM reporting in coordination with quality reporting programs
Providers must report data on an ongoing basis to established public health registries. Registry options include Immunization, syndromic surveillance, ELR, and specialized (PDMP, cancer, etc.). Eligible provider objective is to report three measures from measures one through five. Eligible hospital/ critical access hospitals objective must report four measures from measures one through six.
Measure 1- Immunization Registry Reporting
Measure 2- Syndromic Surveillance Reporting
Measure 3- Case Reporting
Measure 4- Public Health Registry Reporting
Measure 5- Clinical Data Registry Reporting
Measure 6- Electronic Reportable Laboratory Results
Providers may choose to report to more than one public health registry to meet the number of measures and providers may choose to report to more than one clinical data registry to meet the number of measures required to meet the objective
According to the AHRQ Conference on Health Care Data Collection and Reporting there are six challenges of today’s performance measurement data collection and reporting environment.
One. Inefficiencies Associated with Performance Measurement Data Collection and Reporting.
The concerns that are associated with this include Variations in Data Collection. Collection and reporting requirements that utilize varied taxonomies and data definitions are affecting the quality of data collected, causing difficulty viewing and using data. The variations also create additional costs to validate transmitted data and continually update forms and systems as collection metrics change in uncontrolled and disorganized ways. Documentation and Data Quality. Many of the challenges relate to issues within health care organizations. These challenges include incomplete clinical documentation, disparate electronic systems within the same organization, failure to understand coding and performance measurement requirements, dependence on manual data abstraction, and inconsistent policies and practices for using secondary data as a source of quality information. Provider Staff Resource Requirements. Staffing resources often must increase in conjunction with reporting requirements due to the differences in reporting requirements set by the various requestors of performance and quality data.
Two. Variations Among Performance Measurement Systems.
Some performance measurement reporting initiatives are mandatory and some are voluntary. Unfortunately, the variations among performance measurement systems and reporting standards make information difficult to collect, aggregate, report, and interpret. Providers are often asked to collect, process, and report data about the same medical conditions, and perhaps the same populations multiple times in different formats.
Three. Organizational and Cultural Issues.
Health care organizations must constantly react to changing requirements placed upon them by accrediting and standards bodies.
Four. Technological Barriers.
The benefits of using technology for performance measurement include facilitating benchmarking activities, providing more timely clinical information for decision support, and collecting data at the point of care in a format that allows multiple secondary uses.
Five. Economic Pressures.
The many economic challenges health care organizations face include higher costs of doing business, declining medical reimbursements, and rising costs to implement information technology solutions. For most health care organizations, the task of addressing the rising tide of performance measurement reporting requirements is further complicated by the costs of collecting data.
Six. Competing Priorities.
There is unclear guidance for prioritizing the reporting of data in response to State and local performance measurement mandates or laws, payer and employer performance measurement initiatives, and national initiatives—few of which are aligned with each other; and absence of a national health care quality data set and report card that can provide defined categories of measures and measurement selection criteria or guidelines, such as defined measure sets.
Extract provides the intelligent data capture solution which can eliminate manual data entry and human error. Extract pulls the clinical data that is needed into the discrete fields--not a just an attachment in the patient record. This means when it is time to run reports you have all of the data right where you want it. Extract integrates easily using HL7 with EPIC, Cerner, Meditech, Athena Health, Allscripts, Nextgen, eClinicalworks EMR/EHR. So where ever you need data to go, we can get it there.
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About the Author: Arik Grundahl
Arik Grundahl is the Sales Development Director at Extract. Arik obtained his MBA in 2012 and has been with Extract Systems for two years. Working in Sales Development and Marketing, Arik is focused on providing information about Extract’s advanced data capture and redaction solutions.